Spineless, short-lived and easily overlooked, poetry pamphlets are thriving against the odds. Financially, they represent a microcosm within a microcosm – yet they are everywhere, and there are ever more competitions offering pamphlet publication as a prize. Pamphlets can take the form of shop windows, calling cards or playgrounds; they can be produced quickly and cheaply, or be labours of love boasting lavish bespoke design. In quality and production value, they vary enormously. Here are six of the best.

Emily Hasler makes a stylish, self-assured debut with Natural Histories (Salt, £6.50), a pamphlet much concerned with naming and origins. "Rhododendron" begins as a family vignette, but Hasler's varied tonal palette ensures the poem soon opens out. The final stanza reads: "Every bloom now is a massive cupped handful. / There is a pink so deep it could be called everlasting. / You wonder, still, how it got here. And how did we? / Arise, tree. The roots are Latin, the origin Nepalese." A lesser poet would have concluded with that striking second line, but Hasler pushes on to a more intriguing resonance, both mock-grandiose and matter-of-fact. Such quirky wit and confidence promises great things.

Tony Williams's new pamphlet pitches the reader into a very different world. All the Rooms of Uncle's Head (Nine Arches Press, £6) is presented as the work of an asylum inmate "somewhere in Central Europe in the first decades of the 20th century", who painted sonnets on to ceramic tiles that were subsequently smashed. Each page depicts a reconstructed tile, complete with cracks and missing fragments. The sonnets relate a power struggle between the speaker, his beloved Mary, Professor Bloodless, and the mysterious Uncle – any or all of whom may be imaginary. A bewildering and darkly humorous meditation on linguistic authority, and "the classless mad" to whom it is denied.

One of the highlights of Jane McKie's Garden of Bedsteads (Mariscat, £5) is the delicately wrought "Leper Window, St Mary the Virgin". Every phrase feels judiciously balanced: "Where God looked / but did not touch, // the lip of sandstone / is purled with fissures …" McKie's chief gift is her precision, both musical and visual. Garden of Bedsteads includes a vivid, visceral description of a peacock, "scabrous with eyes, // neck a wallet of goitres / swallowed, choked down …" Such incisive imagery is not merely descriptive: the peacock is spotted in the grounds of the House of the Binns in Scotland, once the home of General Tam Dalyell, known as "Bluidy Tam" for his brutal suppression of the Covenanters. The "ugly glamour" of the bird is a comment on the ostentatious building and its royalist military history.

A more outlandish historicising informs AB Jackson's handsomely produced Apocrypha (Donut Press, £10). Here, the landscape switches continually between contemporary Scotland and a kitsch wasteland where America used to be. Upon this questionable ground we find Barabbas topping up his tan, "Self-buttered with sun lotion", while Lazarus breakfasts ("three Embassy regal, tea so strong / you could trot a mouse on it") and "the risen Elvis / rolls away his rhinestone". Short and sharp, the poems time their satirical punches perfectly, as a host of biblical characters struggle to come to terms with the mawkish, violent reality of much contemporary Christianity. What holds the gallimaufry together is Jackson's love of language: "Words / flashed their gold leaf, / a self-swallowing // knotwork of new gospel."

Christy Ducker's Armour (Smith/Doorstop, £5) also contains an irreverent take on religion: "Mention God and I think of the nit nurse / who sailed on a cloud of pink mohair / above the cheese polish floor of the Hall …" The shift from lofty concept to felt experience is characteristic: Ducker is fascinated by people and by the human body, and Armour introduces an unusually sociable poetic sensibility, full of warmth but never sentimental. This is a poet in the swim of life, her eyes wide open for everyday wonders. Here she is presented with her new-born baby: "I am astonished / by the way you smell of bloody bread".

A galloping iambic beat, like an over-caffeinated pulse, is maintained throughout Matthew Welton's pamphlet. The poems in Waffles (Egg Box Publishing, £7.99) form interconnecting grids of repetition and parallelism, and cadences ricochet as in an echo chamber: "A yellow swallow hollers in / a hollow yellow willow tree" becomes "A yellow yaffle snaffles up / a pile of apple waffles". Constructivist poems can be as joyless as equations, but Waffles is too playful and too curious about the world for that: "I think that what I'm saying with the words I use / is stuff which, by the sound of things, I might not mean." Welton's highly original approach to form has again produced a set of musical, maddening, irresistible poems.